Saturday, January 24, 2004 ·
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Travel writers love Tucson. This New York Times writer loved Loews Ventana Canyon Resort, Mi Nidito restaurant, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Kartchner Caverns and Kitt Peak — especially Kitt Peak.
As (very) amateur astronomy geeks, Scott and I had decided to splurge on the observatory’s advanced program. This allows visitors to stay up all night looking at sky objects with the assistance of a skilled telescope operator.
It costs $350 for one or two people, plus $55 each for a dormitory room where we would crash in the wee hours of the morning, just like the real visiting astronomers. A midnight lunch and breakfast are included. The program can accommodate just four people a night.
We dropped our bags in our spartan room, then joined the larger group with whom we would be spending the early part of the night. At a cost of just $36, the early nightly program takes advantage of the usually clear desert skies to offer an intimate glimpse of fantastically distant objects to as many as 34 visitors.
The Kitt Peak program is particularly extensive because it is one of of the few astronomical institutions financed by the National Science Foundation, and part of its mission is to engage the public in astronomy. Two of the 25 telescopes that dot the mountaintop are devoted to the public each night. The others are for working astronomers….
had seen some of the same objects through our starter telescope at home, but I was thrilled at their beauty as viewed through the high-quality equipment. The globular cluster in the Hercules constellation, 25,000 light-years away, seemed somehow mine.
After the early group departed at 9, Scott and I continued our night with the sightings of assorted stars, nebulae and galaxies. As our guide, Roy Lorenz, showed us the new sights constantly coming into view, we could practically feel the earth spinning. Since we were the only ones there that night, we benefited from the attention of another guide, Adam Bloch, as well, who helped us take two pictures of deep-sky objects with the observatory’s fancy camera.
Less than four years ago, Congress paid $101 million to buy an 89,000-acre ranch in northern New Mexico of such grandeur and scientific richness it’s been called the Yellowstone of the Southwest. The nation’s backpacking cognoscenti laced up their hiking boots in anticipation. Here, finally, was the chance to tramp across a landscape so iconic of the American West that it appeared for years in Marlboro Man ads and on Stetson hatboxes.
(When a few “sneak peek” hikes were announced in September 2000, 50,000 people telephoned in one day to snare the 1,500 spots.) But the managers also needed time to digest the mandate Congress had handed them. The preserve is “an experiment in land management” that is run neither by the Forest Service nor the National Park Service but by a trust that is governed by presidential appointees. Valles Caldera is to remain a working ranch while also protecting the environment and accommodating hikers, hunters and other users. As if that wasn’t challenging enough, Congress asked the preserve to try to become financially self-sufficient by 2015, whether by charging fees for cattle grazing and recreation or perhaps even permitting some logging. It is a complex, at times contradictory charge and one that makes Valles Caldera a good symbol of the many issues the nation’s public lands grapple with today….
Some of the West’s great vistas thrust themselves on you with a beauty that is almost oppressive. Valles Caldera is not one of these places. Beyond the windshield, steamship clouds dragged their shadows across Valle Grande, a treeless, harvest-colored valley that ran to a horizon of ponderosa and green peaks. A bull elk lounged in the valley with his harem, his chandelier of a rack rising above the grama grass. This is not the awe-demanding West of Albert Bierstadt but the welcoming West of an Aaron Copland score – a big-hearted landscape, heroic, promising, completely American. Seeing it, you realize that you know Valles Caldera from billboards and ads and untold westerns. You feel at home.
